MTV has spo­ken Spidey-4 with Sam Raimi; no real juicy gos­sip bits to be had, but good to hear the project is mov­ing swiftly for­ward nonethe­less. It does appear that the dual Spider-man 4 & 5 shoot­ing sched­ule that was pre­vi­ously rumored may have been dropped, pos­si­bly in favor of The Avengers movie com­ing in 2012.

“The writ­ers, pro­duc­ers and I are work­ing out what the story will be, but we haven’t been talk­ing in terms of Part 4 and 5. […] I’ve read that [about ‘Spider-Man 5’] also, but right now we’re just work­ing on the story for ‘Spider-Man 4,’ just that one film.”

[…]

“We’re def­i­nitely talk­ing about work­ing from all the mate­r­ial in the comic books and noth­ing [invented] out­side of that. All the char­ac­ters or vil­lain or vil­lains, what­ever we decide to do will be from Stan Lee’s cre­ations or those that came after him.”

[On who will be the next villain(s)]

“I do have a pretty good idea, but I’m just not a lib­erty to say yet,”

[On Kirsten Dunst in Spider-man 4]

“I can’t imag­ine mak­ing a ‘Spider-Man’ movie with­out Kirsten,” he said, seem­ingly con­tem­plat­ing the idea in his head with a long pause. “Of course it can be done because Spi­der Man has existed with­out the char­ac­ter of Mary-Jane but she’s one of my favorite parts and it would be a shame not to have her in the pic­ture. I’m hop­ing she’ll be in it and I’m plan­ning on hav­ing a story with her in it.”